


Powerlessness

by RarePairFairy



Series: Fears [5]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Lack of Communication, M/M, Mangst, feeeelliiings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-06
Updated: 2014-03-06
Packaged: 2018-01-14 17:25:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 764
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1274851
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RarePairFairy/pseuds/RarePairFairy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A friendship can only go so far when both parties aren't being completely honest with each other.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Powerlessness

**Author's Note:**

> Is Alison's name spelled with 1 L or 2 Ls ??? Aaaaaa i don't know plz forgive :(

Generally speaking, they bonded over their similarities. But it was one of their differences which brought them especially close, and they didn't know it.

In their hearts, both John and Chris were fighters. It was all they knew how to do in the face of adversity. But they needed something _to_ fight. They needed to be able to brandish a gun or stare down their adversary.

In the face of Stiles’ illness, the illness that took his wife, there was nothing John could do. He couldn’t kick or punch a deteriorative brain disease. His training and his experience as a cop were useless in the face of the prospect of being left utterly alone.

For Chris it was hunting, both having grown up in it and then losing it. He told himself, and he told Alison, that giving up hunting was a choice. But he knew he couldn’t keep up hunting the way they had. His father was in a home oozing black goo. His sister was dead. Both of them had turned out to be psychopaths the very moment he lost them, which had drastically confused his feelings of grief and left him unable to feel anything except angry and bewildered. And his wife. Even thinking about the happy memories they had, Alison’s birth, their first anniversary, he could still only feel the sensation of the knife handle in his grip, the sudden give of flesh and bone as he helped his wife to kill herself. He told himself she wouldn’t have been able to live as a werewolf. She hated them too much.

He told himself it was a choice to stop hunting. It felt too much like serial killing.

It was powerlessness, the terror of the inevitability of losing out, which made the Sheriff and the hunter reach out to each other. To these battered and bruised men it felt a lot like losing a game before even getting off the bench.

And they had children to look after. Children they _couldn’t_ look after, because one of them kept falling for werewolves and sneaking out armed to the teeth in pursuit of monsters, and the other had a terminal illness and, recently, a bad-tempered fox living inside him.

So they bonded over being behaviourally similar and silently agreed not to cry on each other’s shoulders. Drinking and talking well into stupid hours and chasing monsters together soothed them just enough, gave them a chance to unwind enough to feel like human beings. So they unwound, and rewound, around each other.

John Stilinski had picked things up here and there. He knew that Chris found him attractive. He knew that Chris would willingly spend a whole day cleaning the house if John said he was coming over for a few minutes. He discovered, after a particularly memorable drunk conversation, that Chris had spent half of college in love with the (male) captain of the football team. Logically, John would take the bet that Chris could be persuaded to sleep with him. And if he was perfectly honest with himself, John could be persuaded to sleep with Chris. This bothered him less than it probably should, he figured, but he couldn’t care. The thought of Chris being attracted to him made him feel like The Man again. The thought of being desired gave him a feeling of power he thought he’d lost for good.

If that was all, he probably would have asked Chris out, but fear of being selfish held him back. Chris was handsome, he had traits that it made sense to admire. But would John be courting him out of interest, or for an ego boost? It was the first time he’d ever considered flirting with another man and he cared enough about Chris to be afraid of treating him like a sex object.

So that was where John stood. As for Chris, his reasons were much less internally polemic. By the time he started to think consciously of his attraction to John, it had grown into an intense infatuation, and accepting his own feelings was a matter more of practicality than preference.

But the bond between them felt settled and final, at least on the surface. It was a friendship. A professional partnership, as co-protectors of Beacon Hills. Taking a chance by stating his feelings meant risking losing John as a friend. So, not typically being a gambler, Chris waited and fretted and _felt_ , and said nothing.

And in this way, bitterly, even the only source of genuine pleasure for them both turned into yet another source of weakness.


End file.
